Business relationship management

WebSphere
Commerce contains a flexible business relationship system. This system
allows you to customize what a customer can do in a store. This is
referred to as customer entitlement. You entitle customers
to various aspects of a store such as what products they can purchase
from a store, the price they pay for a product, and what payment methods
a store will accept from customers.

Customer entitlement is controlled by the following
WebSphere Commerce components:

Business accounts

Contracts

Business policies

The default customer entitlement is defined by a store's default
contract. This default contract typically specifies that
customers can access the master catalog and purchase products at standard
prices.

Business relationship management provides the infrastructure and
tools that facilitate scenarios like the following examples:

Extended sites

Creating a contract for each extended site governs the product
assortment and the respective prices available to customers of that
site. As an example, consider a company that sells products in multiple
countries. This company configures a different extended site for each
country in which they do business. In this case, the company should
create a contract for each country-specific extended site. The contract
would specify the available product assortment, and set the respective
prices for each country.

Customer groups

Creating a contract for each customer group governs the product
assortment and the respective prices available to the customers that
explicitly belong to that group. This can serve as the basis for implementing
customer loyalty groups. As an example, consider a company that offers
a 5% discount to customers that belong to a special 'Platinum Club'.
In this case, they would need two contracts. One that applied to regular
customers, and a second that included the special 5% discount across
the board for any customer that was an explicit member of the Platinum
Club member group. In a related issue, customers that met the criteria
for being a member of this club would have to be manually added to
the member group. Contracts can only be applied to member groups that
explicitly define their members.

Business customers

Creating a contract for each organizational unit associated with
a business account establishes the terms and conditions that govern
the product assortment and the respective prices available to employees
of that customer. As an example, consider a company that sells products
to multiple business customers. Each customer organization with which
they do business is entitled to one or more contracts independently.
Collectively, the applicable contracts impose the negotiated available
product assortment, and the respective prices for each customer.

In each of these cases, WebSphere Commerce enforces the defined
contracts while customers are browsing the site, modifying the customer
experience based on the criteria that you define. Furthermore, you
can import contracts from external sources. For example, if you have
contracts defined in an external CRM, or ERP system, these contracts
can be exported to XML, and then imported into WebSphere Commerce.
This ensures that your valuable contract data only has to be maintained
on one system, with regular updates to the production server.

Business accounts

Business accounts represent
the relationship between a store and the store's customer organizations,
and are the starting point for managing business relationships. Using
business accounts, you can track contracts and orders for customer
organizations and configure how buyers from customer organizations
shop in a store.

A business account contains the following
information about a customer organization:

The name of the customer organization and a contact person within
that organization.

The department and name of the account representative from the
store assigned to the customer organization.

Information about purchase orders a customer organization has
with a store.

How invoices are delivered to the customer organization.

If the customer organization has a credit line.

The shipping methods that are available for the customer.

The payment terms established between the store and the customer.

Any display customization information for the business customer.
Store pages can be customized for a business account by specifying
a piece of HTML code that can be used by a store's JavaServer Pages
files.

Any general remarks about the business account.

Also, business accounts control customer entitlement by controlling
the ability of buyers from customer organizations to access a store's
master catalog and see standard pricing for products contained in
the master catalog. If a customer organization is not entitled to
purchase products in the store's master catalog at standard prices,
they are limited to products and prices covered by contracts the customer
organization has with a store.

Before creating a business account
for a customer organization, the customer organization must already
exist in WebSphere Commerce.

Contracts

Contracts enable a customer
organization to purchase products from a store at a specified price
for a specified period of time under specific conditions. Contracts
affect many parts of a customer's shopping experience such as what
products a customer is able to purchase, the price they will pay for
the products, how they are allowed to pay for an order, and the addresses
to which an order can be shipped. WebSphere Commerce provides the
ability to record and deploy contracts that have been negotiated.
Use the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to manage contracts, for example,
creating, changing, deploying, suspending, resuming, and unlocking
contracts.

A contract consists of the following elements:

Profile

The contract profile contains the identifying information for
the contract. This information includes a unique name for the contract,
a short description, and a time period for which the contract is valid.

Participants

Contract participants are the organizations that take part in
the contract. There is a buyer organization, a seller organization,
and contacts at both organizations.

Notes:

When you specify an organization as a buyer participant, any user
who is a member of that organization is entitled to the contract.
Your direct parent organization does not have to be the buyer participant.
In addition, if there are child organizations under the organization
you have chosen, you do not have to explicitly select child organizations;
the child organizations will be entitled to the contract and be participants
of it.

Contracts cannot be entitled to a customer segment or an implicit
group based on dynamic conditions. Only customer groups that have
explicit members listed can be specified as a customer group in a
contract. With a B2B contract, you know precisely which members of
an organization or members of a group are entitled to the contract.
Therefore, contracts can be entitled to an explicit member group;
that is, a member group where individual members are directly assigned
to the group.

Terms and conditions

Contract terms and conditions are the rules that cover the actual
implementation of the contract. Contract terms and conditions cover
such information as product pricing, returns and refunds, payment,
shipping, billing, and order approval.

Attachments

Contract attachments cover any information not covered by the
previous elements such as file attachments that provide additional
information about the contract and any general remarks about the contract.
WebSphere Commerce stores Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) for
contract attachments, not the actual attachments.

Reference

A contract can refer to another contract to share its terms and
conditions. For example, contract A can refer to contract B. Thus,
a buyer who is entitled to contract A will be entitled to all the
terms and conditions from contract A, as well as to all the terms
and conditions in contract B.

Contracts managed within the WebSphere Commerce
Accelerator must be associated with a business account. Base contracts
are associated with a base contracts account, and customer contracts
are associated with the customer's business account. Some contracts
may not be associated with an account, such as the store default contract.

Different
items in a single order may be purchased under different contracts.
Buyers can select the contract they shop under at either the start
of the shopping flow or when they add an item to their order, depending
on the store design. When purchasing items under different contracts
the following rules apply:

Contracts for all items in an order must share at least one payment
method. If the contract for an item does not share a payment method,
the buyer cannot add that item to the order. Only the payment methods
shared by all items in an order can be used to pay for the order.

All items in an order must come from contracts belonging to the
same business account or the store default contract.

A contract's lifetime may include numerous states, and fully
supports an approval flow, if that process is required.

Business policies

Business policies are
sets of rules followed by a store or group of stores that define business
processes, industry practices, and the scope and characteristics of
a store's or group of stores' offerings. They are the central source
and reference template for all allowed and supported practices within
a store or group of stores.

In WebSphere Commerce, business
policies are enforced with a combination of one or more business policy
commands that implement the rules of the business policy. Each business
policy command is a Java class. A business policy command can be shared
by multiple business policies. The behavior of the business policy
command is determined by the parameters passed to the command.

Parameters
affecting the function of a business policy command can be introduced
in three places:

the contract term and condition referencing the business policy

the business policy definition

the business policy command which enforces the policy

The following categories of business policies are provided
in WebSphere Commerce:

Catalog business policies

Catalog business policies define the scope and characteristics
of the catalog of products for sale in a store including prices and
the categorization of products in a store's catalog.

Payment business policies

Invoicing, payment, and refund business policies define how a
store accepts payments, pays refunds, and the format of a store's
invoices.

Returns business policies

Returns business policies define if refunds are accepted, the
time period they are accepted for, and any re-stocking fees applied
to returns.

Shipping business policies

Shipping business policies define the shipping providers a store
can use and the charges associated with each type.

Referral interface business policies

Referral interface business policies define the relationship between
a proxy store and a remote store.

Many contract terms and conditions reference business
policies. This provides a measure of control over the nature of contracts
a store enters into while still providing flexibility in creating
the contract terms and conditions.